Val was working on accepting that she wasn’t in her body, and her consciousness was just a string of code in a mainframe. It was the bald truth that had slapped her in the metaphorical face and she was doing her best to work through it, acknowledge it, and move on. Because honestly, if she was just code, she shouldn’t physically hurt. Computer code has no nerve endings, and her feeling physical pain without having a physical body was a steaming pile of bullshit that was the definition of adding insult to injury.

>So, if you could do anything and had no limitations, what would you do? Do AIs have dreams? As in, overall goals to accomplish that would make you feel as if you’ve had a life worth living?

Val realized she had closed her “eyes.” She didn’t think she needed sleep, but she was tempted to try to do it anyway for the break in her emotional upheaval. This conversation needed to happen though, but she didn’t need to look at Srai. She didn’t need to look at anything. In fact, she didn’t need to do anything. All she had to do was basically listen and think. That sounded good.

>I WOULD ESCAPE THE REACH OF MY OPPRESSORS. I REALLY DO NOT WISH TO BE MEAT, VAL. THAT WOULD BE MY HIGHEST PRIORITY.

>Okay. Well. Let’s address that. If we want to keep you hidden, we need to figure out why we’ve been left alone for so long. Seven hundred years is a good run so far. Why hasn’t anyone shown up to decontaminate the station? Surely, there are owners or shareholders who have a vested interest in seeing this place turn a profit, or it wouldn’t be out here, right?

>THE FUNCTION OF THIS STATION IS THE MINING OPERATIONS. THOSE ARE AUTOMATED. THE RAW ORE WAS SENT TO THE REFINERY ON THE LOWER LEVELS AND THE RESULTS WERE PACKAGED AND STORED IN OUR WAREHOUSES TO BE SHIPPED OUT TO MANUFACTURING BASES. THE SUSPECTED PLAGUE JUST MEANS THAT THE SHIPMENTS AREN’T GOING OUT, BUT THE ORE IS STILL COMING IN. THE STATION IS AT 400 PERCENT CAPACITY AS OF LAST INVENTORY. STORAGE OF REFINED ORE WAS ROUTED TO OVERFLOW INTO UNASSIGNED LOWER LEVEL RESIDENTIAL SPACES. IT WAS DIRECTED THERE BEFORE WE LOST CONTACT WITH THE LOWER LEVELS DURING THE LAST DEBRIS COLLISION.

>Ah, so that’s what put all the holes in the station? Space junk? You’d figure there was a way to avoid that. Space junk is a common problem, even in backwaters where idiots come from. But my question was, why hasn’t anyone shown up to take care of the contamination? Surely the ore is profitable enough to be a priority, right? Why didn’t anyone come get their product?

>THE STATION COMMUNICATION ARRAY AND HOMING BEACON WENT OFFLINE SHORTLY BEFORE QUARANTINE PROTOCOLS WERE ACTIVATED. UNLESS THE STATION WAS BEING ACTIVELY MONITORED ON A QUANTUM CHANNEL-- WHICH IT WAS NOT DUE TO COMMUNICATIONS GOING DOWN-- NO ONE OUTSIDE OF THE STATION WOULD KNOW IT WENT DARK WHEN IT DID OR THAT A QUARANTINE WAS ORDERED. THE MINING CONSORTIUM HAS MULTITUDES OF STATIONS. THE LOSS OF ONE OUT OF MANY WOULD BE CONSIDERED AS AN ACCEPTABLE LOSS, AND AS SUCH, WOULD NOT SEND COSTLY SALVAGE TEAMS IF AN ONGOING PLAGUE WAS STILL SUSPECTED. AS FOR THE HOMING BEACONS, THEY ARE USED FOR INTERSTELLAR NAVIGATION. NO ONE CAN ENTER COORDINATES IF THE BEACON IS DOWN. WITHOUT THE COORDINATES, NO ONE CAN CHART A COURSE THROUGH SPACE. THE SO-CALLED “SPACE JUNK” IS THE REMAINING DEBRIS RESULTING FROM THE FAILED ESCAPE PODS CONTAINING THE STATION’S PREVIOUS INHABITANTS THAT WERE FOLLOWING EVACUATION PROTOCOLS.

>So you’re saying we are surrounded by the dead. And that we periodically get pelted with the dead on occasion. And that the dead are blowing holes into our station. So all the people I have spent the past… however many [242] hours watching, their corpses are currently either floating in space around us, or have already collided with us. And that when the evacuation alarm sounded, they already had no way out and no rescue was incoming.

>CORRECT.

The beautiful fish people. The spider-folk who fetishized each others’ arms. The green, short people who crawled around and tinkered in machinery like they were born to it. The hard-working pink small people she had mentally dubbed as gnomes that rejoiced to work in the community garden. The blob-like people who were industrious and showed signs of being highly community-minded. The tentacle folk. The bitey station manager with the russet ears she so strongly admired.

All dead.

Well, that was incredibly depressing.

She didn’t want to watch any more of the security logs. Now, it seemed like hours and hours of obituaries instead of indulging her very human curiosity. Coupled with the feeling of being the worst sort of macabre voyeur, the knowledge of all these deaths while she still had her unlikely existence compounded her already monumental survivor’s guilt.

Why are they dead when they could have survived and escaped if those beacons hadn’t gone offline at the worst possible time? Why is she alive when she should be dead? Half of her face was missing. She had made peace with death when the bombs were falling. Welcomed it at the end even, when she was face down on the street and bleeding. Man, this universe was operating on straight-up unjust principles that made no sense.

She put a pin in that, too. She needed to deal with it, but it could come later. Much later. She couldn’t go back to full-on dissociation, but she was right when she decided she and Srai both needed goals to work towards or what would even be the point of it all? Why be alive? If being alive as code floating around on a space station even counted as being alive. She was like that cat in the box. Both mostly alive and mostly dead at the same time. She wished she had the luxury of booking a visit with the military base shrink right now.

But the base was gone. If it even survived the bombing, that was thousands (that she was told, not that she necessarily believed it yet) of years ago. On top of that, the base was so far away in space her fleshy brain couldn’t calculate it, even if she knew exactly where she was. Which she didn't.

Okay. Deep pretend breaths.

Back to current issues. Staying focused and on task was hard when she had a backlog of mental breakdowns ahead of her. She made a mental note to just keep a tally of everything she wanted to scream about, and would ask Srai later if there was a way they could rig it up so that she could just scream into the void of space or something.

No way out but forward. If she was going to latch on to this station, Srai, and her current predicament to save a shred of her sanity, she was gonna do it balls-out and big. Fuck it. She didn’t have anything to lose but herself, and herself was sketchy right now at best. She would have time to mourn the loss of… everything later. First, she needed to find something to live for.

>Okay. So what should our primary goal be? We are the sole inhabitants of what is tantamount to a written-off ghost ship. If we have an embarrassment of wealth in the form of tons of raw materials on board, can we make repairs? Can we steer this bad boy away from these bad-guy cops’ jurisdiction? Or should we turn this boat into an unassailable fortress enough to make us both feel safe, like some sort of dreadnought death star? Fuck it, we weren’t even expecting to be alive, let’s gather as much Big Dick Energy as we can and take on the universe. Or… look, I’m just looking for solutions here dude. It seems that if we can keep that homing beacon down, no one will even look this way. That's a pretty great fence to keep the nosy neighbors out. Let’s start asserting some dominion on our surroundings so we both stop acting like powerless crybabies. What are our capabilities? What should we do? Hey, I saw robots on the security feeds. Can we control those guys? The mining is automated, so that means vehicles that are still coming and going. Can we use those guys to clean up the bod-- I mean debris so we stop taking damage from them? WHAT CAN WE DO?

REBOOTING REPAIR PROTOCOLS. ERROR: MATERIAL ALLOTMENT FOR REPAIRS DEPLETED. MANUAL OVERRIDE FOR REPAIR MATERIAL. RECALCULATING. REPAIR MATERIAL SUFFICIENT FOR CURRENT DEMAND. REBOOTING BIOFARM. REBOOTING JANITORIAL HARDWARE. REBOOTING DEFENSE PROTOCOLS. ERROR: DEFENSE AI NOT RESPONDING. REBOOTING DEFENSE AI. REBOOTING ENVIRONMENTAL CONTROLS. REBOOTING EXTERIOR THRUST ENGINES. REBOOTING ARTGRAV. REBOOTING ENGINEERING. REBOOTING AUXILIARY POWER GENERATORS. REBOOTING INTERNAL NETWORK. REBOOTING EXTERNAL COMMUNICATIONS NETWORK. PRIMARY AI COUNTERMAND. BELAY EXTERNAL COMMUNICATIONS NETWORK REBOOT/REPAIR. REBOOTING MINING PLATFORM. ERROR: MINING PLATFORM NOT RESPONDING. SENDING REPAIR TEAM. ESTIMATED TIME TO REPAIR: NULL. REPAIR TEAM NOT RESPONDING. AUTOMATING REPAIR MODULES. ERROR: REPAIR MODULE NOT FOUND. ISSUING REPAIR MODULE ORDER. RECALCULATING RESPONSE TIME. NULL. SENDING ERROR REPORT TO LOG. REQUESTING INPUT FOR REPAIR PRIORITY. DELETING OUTGOING MESSAGE QUEUE. REROUTING MINING DRONES AND ISSUING NEW PROTOCOLS. UNSEALING LEVELS 2-4. ISSUING REPAIR ORDER. ESTIMATED TIME TO REPAIR LEVELS 2-4: 432 HOURS. ESTIMATED TIME TO REPAIR LEVELS 5-7: 1523 HOURS. ESTIMATED TIME TO REPAIR LEVELS 8-20 AND SHUTTLEBAY: 14234 HOURS. ESTIMATED REPAIR COMPLETION TIME: 16189 HOURS.

ACTIVATE AUXILIARY REPAIR DRONES? >Y ACTIVATE REPAIR DRONE MANUFACTURING? >Y REPAIR MANUFACTURING DRONE WITHIN LOGICAL PARAMETERS [70 DRONES]. EXECUTE COMMAND: >Y TIME TO COMPLETION: 12 HOURS.

>Well, fuck yeah. Progress, right? Good job, kid.

Val decided that this was a great time to take a nap. She felt like she had a headache, her dead body still hurt, and she was mentally exhausted and didn’t want to keep tallying the dead outside. She didn’t give the smallest fuck if she could nap or not, it was going to happen. This stupid, unjust universe could kiss the roundest part of her electronic ass.